The inhabitants of the town in the story “A very old man with enormous wings”, by Gabriel Márquez, did not understand that they could very well be in the midst of one of the celestial creatures of the gods. The old man that Pelayo found crawling in the mud on the beach had wings like an angel, did not speak their language as an angel might not, and was as peaceful and innocent as an angel could be. But because he did not meet the exact “standards” of greatness that people thought angels should have, they ignored him and set him aside as irrelevant and “…Father Gonzaga was healed of his insomnia forever…” (403) . In the text “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” the citizens' inability to determine the winged man's “being” highlights their paradigms. The townspeople determine that the old man does not meet the "criteria" of an angel. They ignored him in part because of “His enormous buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked” (401). He was old and decrepit and looked crazy. Furthermore, angels are considered elegant and beautiful with a kind of spiritual presence. But instead the old man looked like a “ragman” (401) and smelled of the desert. Next, the priest tries to test the man to see if he speaks Latin, “the language of God.” But because the man could not speak Latin, was under the "suspicion of an impostor" (401), he was considered the devil's "carnival trick" (401). Furthermore, the main significant terrestrial qualities of man were his wings and his strangeness. As for how angels are thought of, the only other characteristic that closely resembled a celestial being was that he could accept everything his viewers did to him as if "his only supernatural virtue seemed to be patience" ( 401). But his imperturbability and innocence are misunderstood by people and exploited to the extreme. The citizens are cruel and treat that man badly because they don't understand him. They take out some of his remaining feathers to “touch their defective parts” (402). People have the audacity to take from man, without permission, in an attempt to add to themselves and seem to have no remorse for what they have taken. Also, at one point in the story a spectator burns him with a branding iron, because he thought maybe he was dead...